The major thesis of "Atlas Shrugged," which states that the most productive and capable persons in every area of the economy should be given relatively free reign to pursue their goals with little or no governmental supervision, has an idyllic sound. However, there is a fallacy in this very optimistic view of even very capable human beings. The people of the United States and the world have experienced the imperfections in human nature in many man-made economic catastrophes such as occurred in 1929 and 2008.

Unfortunately, capable and productive people are not always interested in doing what is best for the U.S., the world or even their own best long-range self interest. Too often there are those who pursue their own selfish or short-range self interests either for financial, power or some other self-serving goal or aggrandizement.

There is also no question that government can become a menace to its own citizens and/or to society. This is demonstrated by the many authoritarian and/or dictatorial regimes that have occurred through history in the world. Therefore it would seem that one of the major goals of a democracy should be to search for the proper compromise between capitalism and regulatory government to bring about the best economy for the people. It would appear that this has been at least one of the overall purposes of the U.S. government during its lifetime as well as in similar periods in other democratic nations in the world.

From the nature of the political economies in the U.S. and the world at the present time, however, it appears democracies have not yet reached the best economic compromise of capitalism and governmental regulation. Thus in this human-condition world, democracies need to continue to attempt to find the best regulated economic arrangement they can. And in this on-going process, they probably should follow the historical dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis with the synthesis being the new thesis. Or to state it another way, democracies need to continue to experiment to attempt to find the best working compromise between free enterprise and government regulations for the optimum economic interests of the people.